Escape from Power by Petzi

[raw]
made by Petzi for LD 39 (COMPO)

* Instructions **

This is a local two-player cooperative game, though you can player it by yourself, aswell. Each player controls one of the rabbits and each rabbit holds controls part of the flying drone: one player aims and the other shoots. It's meant to be played by two players side by side, one using the keyboard and the other the mouse. The controls are in the title screen. You can customize the controls, instructions for that are in the Readme file.

Please leave a comment :)


I wanted to copy the Bungee Buddies minigame from WarioWare: Smooth Moves and add some things into the mix. The idea was to make a game for two players using a single Wiimote-Nunchuk. After a few hours, I realized I was going to spend the entire weekend messing with technical stuff and that even if I succeeded, most of my potential players don't own a Wiimote and a bit of effort is required to connect one to your PC (at least on Windows).

So, I dropped the idea of having the players physically jump. And for the compo, I decided to have it use the keyboard and mouse.

I think it's interesting, but I didn't quite nail it. Despite having spent most of Sunday creating and balancing the difficulty progression, I feel it's too easy for me, so it's ultimately kind of boring. It could definitely use more content, too.

What I learned from making this is that, for this type of game, you need to carefully consider your restraints for generating obstacles. The biggest difficulty I had was with the energy: energy is health and ammo in this game, so how much energy the players receive is what affects the balance most. You need to make sure the game doesn't become unreasonable at any point, but if you don't design your game correctly, it becomes very hard to make sure it's neither too easy nor too hard. I get the feel that there's some crucial design change I need to make to avoid this problem.

Anyway, thanks for reading! I hope you have fun with the game!

UPDATE: You can now customize your controls.

start.png

screenshot1.png

screenshot2.png

screenshot3.png

Ratings

Overall 489th 3⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Fun 379th 3.05⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 325th 3.1⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Theme 497th 3.15⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 431th 2.95⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Audio 396th 2.579⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Humor 245th 2.588⭐ 19🧑‍⚖️
Mood 461th 2.632⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Given 21🗳️ 20🗨️

Feedback

Estebe
31. Jul 2017 · 17:09 UTC
For some reason this game runs very slow for me.
I'm not sure why that is, because I've submitted a GameMaker-game too.
I've also compiled it from source, but no difference.
So unfortunately I can't rate your game as I couldn't play it.
You've made a good effort though!
eximarus
31. Jul 2017 · 17:25 UTC
The shooting didnt work for me, I tried the x key and all other keys but it just wouldnt shoot...
Zelos
31. Jul 2017 · 17:45 UTC
I didn't have any of the problems the other two people had before me. The game runs fine and the controls worked. The download didn't start on Firefox for some reason, but Chrome worked. Might want to consider uploading somewhere else, like itch.io.

I don't have a second player with me, so I played alone. Unfortunately my keyboard is not QWERTY but QWERTZ, which made the jumping really awkward.
The idea is really cool and it also works quite well single-player.

You didn't opt out of Audio, but I couldn't hear a sound, so I'm not going to comment on that.

The graphics are pretty good and convey what you're trying to do. I'm surprised you managed to get the collision boxes to be that accurate in the short amount of time. I expected to hit something because the perspective was weird at first.

Overall I like the concept and as you said - you didn't nail it exactly, but it's definitely not bad.
Michael Feldman
31. Jul 2017 · 18:46 UTC
Good game for two people. Also works for one. I was not expecting those red rings, it was fun trying to predict their positions.
🎤 Petzi
01. Aug 2017 · 21:19 UTC
Thanks for all your feedback! Man, there sure were a lot of technical problems, though. Funnily, I also got that out-of-nowhere slowness at one point. I don't know what caused it, as it even affected an executable that had no slowness before. But rebooting my computer fixed it, so maybe you can try rebooting.

As for the keys, none of them working is pretty strange. But I've added a configuration file so that you can customize the controls, that should mitigate any problems with non-QWERTY keyboards. I didn't bother to include controller or Wiimote support, but if anyone wants to try it, just let me know and I can add it pretty quickly :)

The game does have sound effects, but no music. Again, I don't know what could've caused them to fail :/ Maybe you hit 'M' accidentaly? I guess it has to do with Game Maker.

Thanks for your support, I'm pretty happy with both the graphics and the red drones. The collision boxes were actually pretty easy, all I did was make the fence hitbox be only on the top and have the objects only hit when the player was on specific segments of the jump. After playing it again, I think the game's pretty cool, it's just that it's too easy for most Ludum Dare participants.
MCjammydodger
02. Aug 2017 · 07:57 UTC
I played this one solo, but I still had fun! I made it to the end, I like how the difficulty increased the further I progressed. The variety in enemies was nice, although I only came across one purple ring once and I didn't notice a difference in behaviour between it and the gold ring.

The first download link worked fine for me, but the itch.io link doesn't work correctly; it brings me to a 404 page not found error.

I imagine this game would be more fun with a second player. Well Done!
Fawaz.Strawberry
07. Aug 2017 · 23:50 UTC
Simple game, but i still had a lot of fun playing it. I enjoyed how the difficulty progressed well as the red rings arrived. The increase in speed also made the game unique enough to continue playing. The controls messed me up horribly as i continually pressed the wrong key, (i was playing solo) but that just added to the enjoyment. I think music would definitely help the game out but what's here is already pretty good.

Overall nice game and i look forward to your future ones.
mamoniem
11. Aug 2017 · 15:05 UTC
good game design, this might make a good lil game in the future.

-m
tjakka5
12. Aug 2017 · 13:47 UTC
Interesting concept for sure. I'd also wish for more love for qwertz people ;D

I didn't have a second player here but the game worked rather well as a single player experience too.
But the premise of both players having to control a rabbit and one part of the cannon is pretty cool.

At first i really liked the sound effect of the rabbits jumping, after a while it gets lightly on the nerves though because it is rather long and both players have to jump a lot. Since there is no music you will be hearing that sound effect almost all the time.

The level was surprisingly long with some variation to the enemies. The pink rings seemed a bit more aggressive than the yellow ones, but just as easy. The red ones were really fun to shoot because you had to predict their movement.

I would love to see this game being more developed, getting more enemy variations, maybe different obstacles etc.

Overall it was a lot of fun and a cool new concept, great stuff!
gonutz
12. Aug 2017 · 22:31 UTC
Unfortunately I cannot play your Windows 64 bit game on my 32 bit machine, could you add another build?
🎤 Petzi
17. Aug 2017 · 21:41 UTC
@tjakka5 Thanks for your detailed response! I agree that the jumping sound effect is annoying, I should've worked a bit harder to find a better one. As for the QWERTZ problem, you can use the Customizable Controls feature I added, just follow the instructions in the Readme :)

@gonutz Strange, Game Maker games should work on 32 bit machines, from what I researched. Could you post the error you're getting?
gonutz
18. Aug 2017 · 05:51 UTC
It just says: "... is not a valid Win32 application" which usually means it is 64 bit. But now I opened the .exe in Notepad and it says "PE L" which means it IS actually a 32 bit exe. I don't know what else would cause this error message.
jondalnas
18. Aug 2017 · 15:30 UTC
Short and fun game. Tough it lags a little in verity, maybe other tings to do with the cannon or some sort of moving hole, just to make the game a little more interesting.
🎤 Petzi
18. Aug 2017 · 16:55 UTC
@gonutz Maybe try running it as administrator, or in compatibility mode?

@jondalnas I definitely agree, it could be a pretty good game with enough variety :)
dcrdro
18. Aug 2017 · 17:52 UTC
Pretty intersting game, and cute graphics :)
doorless
18. Aug 2017 · 18:35 UTC
for some reason when I opened the game it would only let me play it for like 30 seconds then it would crash. so I couldn't rate.
🎤 Petzi
20. Aug 2017 · 21:49 UTC
@doorless Did you show you any kind of error when it crashed?